Daily Archives: October 13, 2015

As we discussed today about the importance of Networking, please find below a short video sharing a couple of tips to network.

In my mind, networking is pretty similar to maintain a romantic relationship : it takes time to build, it’s difficult to get the person’s trust and its needs to be updated and sustained to keep the person’s interest.

We often talk about networking and getting contacts that might be useful to our professional lives. However, the take home message from the video is that networking has to work in 2 directions : you are expecting a lot from your network. Therefore, you need to be able at some point to be the one giving a hand/advice/help someone as well 🙂

Celine

Tonight I was with a couple of classmates at the STHML Tech Meet up event. It was at the Hilton Hotel in Slussen and when we arrived there we noticed how crowded it was. The whole auditorium was filled and we had to stand at the site. It started with a short overview of this months biggest investments in Stockholm start-ups and a couple of the start-ups which got the biggest investments came on stage and talked a bit.

After that the subject changed to the refugee problem and how the tech society could help in this problem. Someone of Industrifonden (a VC investment company) came on the stage and hosted this topic together with the two main hosters. There were talkes from a refugee herself and two companies with had an idea for the refugee problem. The first one, was the company which develops the app “Welcome”. This will be an app in which information about Sweden and everything else a refugee needs to know is combined with a tool in which refugees can ask questions to Swedish people and in which Swedish people can post events. This app has the main idea to connect the refugees with the Swedish people and help them to fit in the society. The second company was Refugee tec. This company is going to organise a Hacketon with the refugee problem as its subject.

Then the investors of the Middle East and Asia came on the stage for a discussion. The investors were: Dany Farha (BECO Capital, Dubai), Richard Chen (Ceyuan Ventures, China), Ali H. Karabey (212 Venture, Istanbul) and Numan Numan (212 Venture, Istanbul). It was nice to hear the difference between the start-up world over there and here in Western Europe.

Last, there were two start-up pitches. The first one was from Gymgo. It was a bit strange, because he was cut of after he just spoke three sentences and he was than burned by the investors. It was a bit sad for the guy which was standing in front of whole croud and was ready to pitch his idea. After that he tried to keep on going strong, but the investors keep making fun of him. In my opinion it wasn’t really fair, but maybe this is how it goes in the Venture Capital world. The second pitch was from Zeifie, the security app which Pernilla Rydmark from IIS also told about. This pitch got some good feedback from the investors.

I wrote a post earlier about how I thought that the idea that Sophie Lööb presented about a refugee linkage platform would be great. I today read this article that made me think about it again.

http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/jobb-karriar/experimentet-natdelningar-ska-ge-jobb-pa-en-manad/

The plattform, Nätverkskollen, allows you to post that you want a job and spread it into your different networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter et.c.). The idea lets you specify your competences in a predefined framework that makes searching easy. Using that concept, you could easily link up refugees that don’t speak Swedish by simply allowing Syrian translation of your input. Thoughts on that?

Another, perhaps simpler, idea would be to create a Facebook group or LinkedIn group for refugees as to concentrate employers and employees that are relevant to this. Thoughts?

During our video presentation pitch about uniting all tet communication under one unified platform, we got some insightful feedback from the guest lecturer. The feedback was regarding how social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack et.c. are extremely dependant on users using their websites. This is because of several different reasons:

• Selling advertising – can sell it much more expensive/higher volume if there are a lot of users constantly on the site
• Overall valuation – the more people that use the website, the higher the platform is valued

So the point of this feedback was, if you try to redirect traffic from platforms that are dependent on that traffic, you are likely to reach considerable resistance. I totally agree with this and it is something that our group did not think about.

On that note, check out this article about a start up who want to unify news regarding celebrities. They should run in to the same problem.

http://breakit.se/artikel/1500/kompisganget-som-hjalper-dig-att-fa-annu-battre-koll-pa-kandisarna

Since we discussed the importance in developing professional relationships and networking during todays lecture it was a bit striking to directly stumble across two articles on the subject. The first one got me thinking about all the different types of social media we explore in this course, and that they really fill a purpose – especially considering promoting startups.

The second article is a bit humorous, but I like the new angle in social networking between entrepreneurs.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251620

http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/12/pif-is-tinder-for-networking-entrepreneurs/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=twitter

/Isac